Group negative curvature for 3-manifolds with genuine laminations (Q1269697)

In [Ann. Math., II. Ser. 130, No. 1, 41-73 (1989; Zbl 0685.57007)] \textit{D. Gabai} and \textit{U. Oertel} introduced the notion of essential laminations in 3-manifolds. These are codimension-one laminations where each leaf is \(\pi_1\)-injective, with no 2-sphere leaves, where the complement of the lamination is incompressible and where each closed complementary component is end-incompressible. Manifolds with essential laminations generalize Haken manifolds and manifolds with Reebless foliations, and one of the main goals of the theory has been to generalize to manifolds with essential laminations the known results about Haken manifolds. In this paper, the authors consider manifolds with genuine laminations, that is, essential laminations which are not obtained from a Reebless foliation by splitting open along the leaves. These manifolds include in particular manifolds with pseudo-Anosov flows. The main result is that the fundamental group of a closed atoroidal 3-manifold containing a genuine lamination is word hyperbolic. The proof consists in exploiting the fact that some closed complementary component of the lamination is not an \(I\)-bundle, and applying to it Gabai's Ubiquity Theorem (to appear in [Surveys in Differential Geometry, 5, International Press]) to show that the manifold satisfies a linear isoperimetric inequality. The results can be seen as a weak general form of Thurston's hyperbolization theorem.